Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin. Otto Jespersen
perversions of a late age, really represented one of the vital principles of language, without which it could never have come into existence.
One of the first to take the new point of view and to explain it clearly was Hermann Paul. I quote from an early article (as translated by Sweet, CP 112) the following passages, which really struck a new note in linguistic theory:
“There is one simple fact which should never be left out of sight, namely, that even in the parent Indogermanic language, long before its split-up, there were no longer any roots, stems, and suffixes, but only ready-made words, which were employed without the slightest thought of their composite nature. And it is only of such ready-made words that the store is composed from which everyone draws when he speaks. He has no stock of stems and terminations at his disposal from which he could construct the form required for each separate occasion. Not that he must necessarily have heard and learnt by heart every form he uses. This would, in fact, be impossible. He is, on the contrary, able of himself to form cases of nouns, tenses of verbs, etc., which he has either never heard or else not noticed specially; but, as there is no combining of stem and suffix, this can only be done on the pattern of the other ready-made combinations which he has learnt from his fellows. These latter are first learnt one by one, and then gradually associated into groups which correspond to the grammatical categories, but are never clearly conceived as such without special training. This grouping not only greatly aids the memory, but also makes it possible to produce other combinations. And this is what we call analogy.”
“It is, therefore, clear that, while speaking, everyone is incessantly producing analogical forms. Reproduction by memory and new-formation by means of association are its two indispensable factors. It is a mistake to assume a language as given in grammar and dictionary, that is, the whole body of possible words and forms, as something concrete, and to forget that it is nothing but an abstraction devoid of reality, and that the actual language exists only in the individual, from whom it cannot be separated even in scientific investigation, if we will understand its nature and development. To comprehend the existence of each separate spoken form, we must not ask ‘Is it current in the language?’ or ‘Is it conformable to the laws of the language as deduced by the grammarians?’ but ‘Has he who has just employed it previously had it in his memory, or has he formed it himself for the first time, and, if so, according to what analogy?’ When, for instance, anyone employs the plural milben in German, it may be that he has learnt it from others, or else that he has only heard the singular milbe, but knows that such words as lerche, schwalbe, etc., form their plural lerchen, etc., so that the association milbe-milben is unconsciously suggested to him. He may also have heard the plural milben, but remembers it so imperfectly that he would forget it entirely were it not associated in his mind with a series of similar forms which help him to recall it. It is, therefore, often difficult to determine the share memory and creative fancy have had in each separate case.”
Linguists thus set about it seriously to think of language in terms of speaking individuals, who have learnt their mother-tongue in the ordinary way, and who now employ it in their daily intercourse with other men and women, without in each separate case knowing what they owe to others and what they have to create on the spur of the moment. Just as Sokrates fetched philosophy down from the skies, so also now linguists fetched words and forms down from vocabularies and grammars and placed them where their natural home is, in the minds and on the lips of ordinary men who are neither lexicographers nor grammarians, but who nevertheless master their language with sufficient ease and correctness for all ordinary purposes. Linguists now were confronted with some general problems which had not greatly troubled their predecessors (with the solitary exception of Bredsdorff, whose work was entirely overlooked), namely, What are the causes of changes in language? How are they brought about, and how should they be classified? Many articles on these questions appeared in linguistic periodicals about the year 1880, but the profoundest and fullest treatment was found in a masterly book by H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, the first edition of which (1880) exercised a very considerable influence on linguistic thought, while the subsequent editions were constantly enlarged and improved so as to contain a wealth of carefully sifted material to illustrate the various processes of linguistic change. It should also be noted that Paul paid more and more attention to syntax, and that this part of grammar, which had been neglected by Bopp and Schleicher and their contemporaries, was about this time taken up by some of the leading linguists, who showed that the comparative and historical method was capable of throwing a flood of light on syntax no less than on morphology (Delbrück, Ziemer).
IV.—§ 4. General Tendencies.
While linguists in the ’eighties were taking up, as we have seen, a great many questions of vast general importance that had not been treated by the older generation, on the other hand they were losing interest in some of the problems that had occupied their predecessors. This was the case with the question of the ultimate origin of grammatical endings. So late as 1869 Benfey included among Bopp’s ‘brilliant discoveries’ his theory that the s of the aorist and of the future was derived from the verb as, ‘to be,’ and that the endings of the Latin imperfect -bam and future -bo were from the synonymous verb fu = Sanskrit bhu (Gesch 377), and the next year Raumer reckons the same theories among Bopp’s ‘most important discoveries.’ But soon after this we see that speculations of this kind somehow go out of fashion. One of the last books to indulge in them to any extent is Scherer’s once famous Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (2nd ed., 1878), in the eighth chapter of which the writer disports himself among primitive roots, endings, prepositions and pronouns, which he identifies and differentiates with such extreme boldness and confidence in his own wild fancies that a sober-minded man of the twentieth century cannot but feel dazed and giddy. The ablest linguists of the new school simply left these theories aside: no new explanations of the same description were advanced, and the old ones were not substantiated by the ascertained phenomena of living languages. So much was found in these of the most absorbing interest that scholars ceased to care for what might lie behind Proto-Aryan; some even went so far as to deprecate in strong expressions any attempts at what they termed ‘glottogonic’ theories. To these matter-of-fact linguists all speculations as to the ultimate origin of language were futile and nebulous, a verdict which might be in no small degree justified by much of what had been written on the subject by quasi-philosophers and quasi-linguists. The aversion to these questions was shown as early as 1866, when La Société de Linguistique was founded in Paris. Section 2 of the statutes of the Society expressly states that “La Société n’admet aucune communication concernant, soit l’origine du langage, soit la création d’une langue universelle”—both of them questions which, as they can be treated in a scientific spirit, should not be left exclusively to dilettanti.
The last forty years have witnessed an extraordinary activity on the part of scholars in investigating all domains of the Aryan languages in the light of the new general views and by the aid of the methods that have now become common property. Phonological investigations have no doubt had the lion’s share and have to a great extent been signalized by that real insight into physiological phonetics which had been wanting in earlier linguists; but very much excellent work has also been done in morphology, syntax and semantics; and in all these domains much has been gained by considering words not as mere isolated units, but as parts of sentences, or, better, of connected speech. In phonetics more and more attention has been paid to sentence phonetics and ‘sandhi phenomena’; the heightened interest in everything concerning ‘accent’ (stress and pitch) has also led to investigations of sentence-stress and sentence-melody; the intimate connexion between forms and their use or function in the sentence, in other words their syntax, has been more and more recognized; and finally, if semantics (the study of the significations of words) has become a real science instead of being a curiosity shop of isolated specimens, this has only been rendered possible through seeing words as connected with other words to form complete utterances. But this change of attitude could not have been brought about unless linguists had studied texts in the different languages to a far greater extent than had been done in previous periods; thus, naturally, the antagonism formerly often felt between the linguistic and the purely philological